Kidnapped by Indians at 11, He Lived with Them for Eight Years - Herman Lehmann's 1927 Memoir

I decided today to read a book off my own shelves before moving on to the next shiny new library book or 2020 ARC that I have sitting on my desk. The book that caught my eye first was A "New Look" at Nine Years with the Indians by Herman Lehmann. It's a rather plain little book that was first published in 1927 as Nine Years with the Indians and then again in 1985 with an additional forty or so pages offering biographical information and stories about the Lehmann family, the "New Look" portion of the book.

Herman Lehmann and his kid brother were kidnapped by Indians in 1870 from a homestead around Fredericksburg, Texas. The eleven-year-old was held captive for the next eight years and would then face the next cultural shock in his life when he had to adapt to the "civilized world" (his words) as a nineteen-year-old. Willie, his younger brother, was fortunate enough to escape after only three days when he was tossed off the backend of the lame horse of an Indian who feared being overrun by those chasing the kidnappers. The boy wandered around for a couple of days before being found and returned to his parents.

Herman Lehmann

What makes this particular copy of the book so special to me is the dedication written inside by Gerda Lehmann Kothmann, the daughter of the same little boy who was thrown off the back end of that horse in May1870. The dedication itself is dated May 10, 1997, six days short of the 127th anniversary of Kothmann's father's capture by the Indians. Willie was eight years old in 1870, so I got curious about how old Gerda would have been in 1997, and I was lucky enough to find her online obituary. It turns out that she died at age 94 in 2013, making her 78 years old when she wrote the dedication.

I'm fascinated by the thought that a woman who died in 2013 could actually be the daughter of a little boy who was kidnapped by Indians in 1870 less than 250 miles from where I live today. Think about that for a moment: a man born during the second year of the American Civil War, a man very lucky even to have survived his ordeal as an eight-year-old child, fathered a daughter who died (in the same part of Texas he was kidnapped in) well into the 21st century. And now I have a book she personally dedicated to family friends of hers. 

I'm only forty pages into the book, but it is proving to be pretty readable for one of this type. Because the memoir was first published 57 years after the kidnapping - and 49 years after its author escaped the Indians - I have to doubt that it is entirely accurate. Really, I wouldn't expect it to be.

But it sure is a fun read.